Highlands
1
Truth and Love
A couple of years ago, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatitis. He’s healthy now, but for about a year, he was quite ill and I traveled to visit him as often as I could. During one visit, the doctors informed me that Dad wasn’t going to live much longer. Maybe only a few hours. Dad is one of the funniest men I have ever known. You never know what he’s going to say! But this was a serious moment.
When you go in there today,
the doctors told me, you need to speak to him like this is the last time you’ll ever see him.
My head was spinning when I entered the room. I was thinking about all the important things I wanted to tell him before I said my last good-bye. In that moment, I felt responsible to express my love and respect for him, to thank him for leading and loving me. So I did. I did it right! I honored my father in what I believed were the final moments of his life.
Then it was his turn.
Dad was alert but struggling to speak. I leaned forward. I hoped maybe he was going to say nice things about me, like I had just said about him, so I leaned even closer. Finally, he said, I need to tell you something before you go.
His voice was barely audible, a whisper.
I’m listening, Dad. What do you need to say?
Tell everybody I died of AIDS.
I was shocked. What are you talking about, Dad? You don’t have AIDS. You have pancreatitis!
No. Tell everybody I died of AIDS.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Why?
I asked.
Because I don’t want anybody to marry my wife.
I laughed so hard. (See, I told you he was funny!) I couldn’t live with those being his last words to me, so I asked, Is there anything else you’d like to say to me?
Yeah,
he said. Come here. I want to tell you a true story.
Yes, sir.
This is true,
he repeated.
What, Dad?
Son. This is true.
I leaned forward, and he whispered, Okay. A polar bear walked home from school one day—
I just totally lost it right there! Obviously this was not a true story. It took me forever to get my composure back so he could finish it.
A polar bear walked home from school one day and asked, ‘Ma, am I a true polar bear?’ She said, ‘Go ask your father.’ The polar bear said, ‘Dad, am I a true polar bear?’ His dad said, ‘Of course you are! Why do you ask?’ He said, ‘Because I’m freezing.’
These are the two things my dad told me on his deathbed.
Then he said, You have got to go. Leave.
I walked out of the room. My dad didn’t die, but I thought that was our last conversation. He missed a great chance to die right there.
My dad is not a liar. He likes to joke around, but he’s an honest man who tells the truth. And he knows that in a dark situation, sometimes the truth isn’t all you need. When you are navigating a dark and desperate situation, you may also need a heavy dose of love and joy. That’s what this book is about. It’s about helping you exercise real love in a world that desperately needs it.
Life-Taking Truth
My experience with church as a kid made me not want to have anything to do with God. As far as I knew, God was mad at me. I learned this from my legalistic church, which was more concerned about everybody acting the right way than actually reaching out to people.
I learned this truth from my Sunday school teacher, who seemed to enjoy torturing us.
She was the meanest person I’ve ever met. And she seemed to have it out for me. She would tell me, Bezet, you are going to hell someday.
I was eight years old! She talked about hell like she was born and raised there. She would ask, Don’t you want to go to heaven?
And I would say, Not if you’re going to be there, I don’t.
One Sunday she was teaching on the Ten Commandments and mentioned never to take the Lord’s name in vain. Without thinking, I blurted out, Gaw-lee!
She stopped her lesson in midsentence, turned directly to me, and asked very slowly, What did you just say?
I answered with a quieter golly
this time. She stared at me with her dark, stone-cold eyes, pointed at me with a knobby finger, and said, Hell is hot, Bezet! Hell is hot! Hot! HOT!
Can you imagine anyone talking to a child that way and expecting them to discover the joy of the Lord?
I learned the truth that God didn’t have time for me from one of our pastors at a church retreat. I’ll call the pastor Brother John,
though that’s not his name. He was one of the only people at that mean church who seemed kind. I can’t tell you exactly why I felt that way. I don’t remember him preaching about kindness. But something about him made me think he knew how to love someone.
That retreat took place during a season in my life when I really could have used some encouragement. My parents’ marriage had been filled with arguments, disagreements, and more fighting and screaming than any kid should ever have to endure. Sometimes the tension felt as thick as a brick wall. For months at a time we didn’t know where Dad was or what he was doing. Thank God my dad is serving the Lord now with all his heart. But that season was filled with a lot of uncertainty and stress. I was terrified of anyone finding out anything. I truly felt alone.
So I asked Brother John if I could go fishing with him. He said yes. I was so excited! I got up before daybreak the next morning, got my fishing pole, and met Brother John at the water. When I said hello, I could tell he wasn’t happy to see me. We fished all morning, and he never said a word to me. If my line got snagged, he would sigh and roll his eyes. The longer we fished, the more nervous I got. Every now and then, I’d make a brief comment, but he wouldn’t respond.
At the end of the day, I said, Bye,
but he didn’t even acknowledge my presence. I thought something was wrong with me. And I continued to feel like there was something wrong with me—not just in Brother John’s eyes, but in God’s eyes as well. I just wasn’t good enough to be around the pastor. To this day, I still struggle with the influence of growing up in that church. I often feel like I’m just not qualified to be in the ministry.
My truth, the truth I learned growing up in church, was that God was mad at me. That I wasn’t good enough. That the only way to be accepted was to keep my problems to myself. That’s not a truth that gives life.
The Good Part of the Past
Even though I hated church—and I thought the church hated me!—there were still many convictions I felt like I could depend on. Most people basically affirmed the sanctity of life. Most people basically affirmed the value of marriage and the family. But these days, it seems hard to find conviction. Anywhere. Two hundred years ago, Americans shared common values that were held in high esteem. We had our disagreements, but certain convictions, at least, were considered sacred. Take the Declaration of Independence, for example, which says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." That means you don’t have to explain them or defend them. They are clear and obvious to everyone.
Those days are gone. It happened gradually, and it has been happening for generations. But now it is clear that our nation has drifted away from the values we shared at the beginning. Truth is no longer self-evident.
The change picked up speed starting around the 1960s. Since then, America has increasingly embraced the philosophy of relativism, the belief that different things are true or right for different people or at different times. It’s where we get the phrase You do you and I’ll do me.
Because of these changes, many Christians today feel it is harder to stand for their convictions than it ever has been. They feel that fifty years ago everyone knew the answer to the question What is truth?
But today our world of black and white has become a world of gray. That’s an uncomfortable place to live. It would be easy to blame those outside the church for these changes. But the thing is, our secular culture isn’t only to blame. We feel lost in a gray and angry world because Christians have failed to recognize and uphold the convictions that previous generations stood for. It’s like Jesus said in Matthew 24:12, Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.
Our world seems darker because our love has grown cold. This has happened in many ways. Here are a few.
Your Mama’s Truth
One reason Christians have failed to resist the drift away from conviction and have lost sight of their first love is that many believers inherit their parents’ beliefs and never make them their own. They pass from childhood into adulthood surrounded by their mama’s truth, but they never embrace this truth for themselves. They never come right out and deny the Christian faith, yet they don’t ever fully embrace it either. But God doesn’t have any grandchildren. At some point all people have to decide for themselves what they believe.
This is a problem especially in the Bible Belt, where I’m a pastor. People are exposed to the faith; it’s available around them. But for too many who grow up in church, it never gets inside them. It’s almost like being around faith has vaccinated them against the gospel.
The Israelites faced the same problem. God made it clear in the law that faithfulness is always one generation away from extinction. That’s why after He gave the law to Moses, He commanded the people to keep the commandments on their hearts. The way to do this is to rehearse and repeat them. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up
(Deut. 6:7). It’s a great plan! But the Israelites failed. At the beginning of Judges, a depressing chapter in Israel’s history, we read, After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel
(Judg. 2:10). Why didn’t they know the Lord or His deeds? Because their parents didn’t teach the faith to them, and the children didn’t make the faith their own.
I meet young people all the time who have no idea who God is and what He has done, even though they were raised in the church by Christian parents. They have access to the faith. They are in proximity to the faith. But it slips away from them.
Jesus knows we have a tendency to slip. That’s why He prayed the way He did in John 17:15, when He said to His Father, I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one
(NLT). Make them holy by your truth,
Jesus continued. Teach them your word, which is truth
(v. 17 NLT). The only way to embrace godly convictions is to cling to God’s Word. The culture we’re in would love to pull us far enough away from the Word that the cost of going back would seem like it’s too much to pay.
Shallow Faith
Another way Christians have wavered from their convictions is that they settle for a shallow faith. Some of us take the first step and make the faith our own, but then we make a mistake: we learn one or two things and stop there. We dabble in the truth but fail to pursue it passionately. The result is that our knowledge isn’t deep enough to support us when we face new challenges. We become like a football team that only knows one or two plays. Any sports fan knows that’s a bad strategy.
Some Cajuns don’t like Louisiana State University’s football coach because he calls the same play over and over. Eventually, the opposing team catches on, no matter how dumb they are. I can say that because I’m an LSU fan. We Cajuns have cheers like this:
Hot boudin, cold kush kush,
Come on, team. Push, push, push!
And there’s this one:
Alligator, alligator, alligator, gar,
We ain’t as dumb as you think we is.
Some say it takes a Cajun two hours to watch 60 Minutes, so that’s how we cheer. But even a Cajun knows you can’t run just one play. You can’t keep your game simple, running the same old routes just because that’s how you were coached growing up.
But that’s what some of us do. We seemingly devoted Christians, whose love grows cold and who walk away from the faith, often do so because our faith was shallow to begin with. We hang on to one or two truths, but when those beliefs no longer work for us, we give them up completely. In fact, many of us are not confident about why we believe in Jesus or even what we believe about Jesus. For example, when a Muslim friend questions the Bible’s teaching about Jesus and suggests that Jesus was a great prophet but not the Son of God, we don’t know how to respond. Too often, when someone presses us about our faith, we come up with our own ideas without consulting the Word of God. Another way to say this is that when we aren’t firm in our convictions, we tend to slip in with the culture around us.
We cannot change the truth. We cannot change God. He’s not going to shift around with our latest ideas. A lot of Christians,
